Sharon women recount Boston Marathon experience

Even for experienced marathon runners like 48-year-old Sharon resident Kathleen Berney, the first time running the Boston Marathon is an unforgettable and trying experience.

“It’s like childbirth. In retrospect, I’ve already started rewriting the day to be an amazing experience,” she said after a day of recovery. “It was an amazing experience, but it was very painful. I’m starting to forget about the pain and just focus on the highlights.”

Berney said that the sense of accomplishment and achievement from completing the Boston Marathon is making all the pain drop away.

“Sometimes the harder it is, the better you feel about it later. You say, ‘Here I am, I endured this, and I live to tell the tale, barely,'” she said.

Berney qualified for this year’s race, but was concerned about her finishing time due to an injury she’s endured since her qualification. She paced herself and finished the race in a little under five hours, she said.

Having forgotten to write her name onto her shirt before the race, she sported it in bold, black Sharpie on both of her arms. The unending crowds of spectators randomly screaming personalized words of encouragement was one of the highlights, and struggles of Berney’s first Boston Marathon experience.

“It’s that level of people rooting for you that maybe you’ve never had in your entire life,” she said. “It’s like you want to do it for them, you want to run for them.”

She said she spend a vast amount of her energy giving high-fives and smiles, which ultimately depleted her energy reserves.

“Eventually I had to move to the middle. It was just becoming too much,” she said.

Berney said she became worried early in the race, when she started to feel funny.

“I was a little nervous early on, around mile 7. I started to feel chills, which is sort of the kiss of death. … Whatever it was, I overcame it, and it didn’t stop me.”

She did, however, say she saw a few people were forced to seek help from the medical tents that line the course.

“I saw one woman really early on in the race get carted off,” she said. “From all the reading on the course I knew that even on the best of days it’s a course that’s so tricky.”

Berney said, as a first-time runner of the Boston Marathon, she especially had trouble with the downhill nature of the route.

“I don’t have top conditioning right now and it was almost impossible to go as slowly as I wanted to on that course because you’re just defying gravity trying to put the brakes on,” she said.

Berney talked about the importance of finding a balance in energy use throughout the race. She said it’s a constant battle between going too fast, “because you’ll have nothing left later,” and going too slow, which would be too much on the legs running downhill.

However, she was able to find her happy place when Bruce Springsteen came blaring into her headphones on her run through downtown Natick.

“‘Born to Run’ had just come up one my headphones, and I came to fire station in Natick, and there were so many families at town center. Everyone wanted to give you oranges, they want to give you water, paper towels,” she said. “For someone who has never run the Boston Marathon, or who has never been a spectator even, it was unbelievable. There’s no way to really understand those crowds until you get there.”

Seasoned marathon runner and 51-year-old Sharon resident Gail Martin, who finished the race in about 4:30, said that after this year, she might be going back to being a volunteer again next year.

“To be fully recovered (from a marathon) for me it takes probably a month. But, in fairness, for someone who’s new, you might want to give it a few months,” she said. “Back when I first started running I couldn’t pick up my legs after.”

Martin came home from the marathon, ate a full meal, took an Epsom salt bath, and stretched. The next morning, she taught a yoga class, had an acupuncture treatment with her husband, and, just to loosen up, took a short jog.

Martin ran her first marathon ever in 1986, around the time when she qualified for her first Boston Marathon, but she was “too chicken” to try it then.

“I thought, ‘Boston, that’s for the elites. I don’t belong there,’” she said.

She eventually qualified again in Boston, with a better time, and ran her first Boston Marathon in 1992. She then ran eight in a row before taking a break to volunteer at the mile 15 water station and to watch the spectacle on T.V. for a few years.

Martin and her husband spent 12 years running 50 marathons in all 50 states in the U.S. This year, she ran her 11th Boston Marathon, making it her 117th full marathon ever.

Even after all those races, this year’s weather at the Boston Marathon took a toll on Martin.

“Right now? I’m tired,” she said after a full night’s sleep and a day of work. “Last night I came home and rested for a really long time. The quads are not happy to go down the stairs.”

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